


Cleopatra's Needle

by yuletide_archivist



Category: The Addams Family (1991)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2006-12-25
Updated: 2006-12-25
Packaged: 2018-01-25 04:10:15
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,827
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1630784
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/yuletide_archivist/pseuds/yuletide_archivist
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>At fifteen, Morticia Frump is as interested in her graveyard gardening as her older sister is in her suitors.  But gardens and suitors do not always stay in their separate worlds.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Cleopatra's Needle

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks to Lija and Sphinx for the writing support, and to Wildgreentide for the conceptual beta. Thanks to Lefty for the editiorial help. Any mistakes that remain in the story are entirely mine.
> 
> Written for Marcelo

 

 

 

 

"We're outdoors."

Morticia looked up at Ophelia from feeding Althus, hand poised over the deep bell of his pitcher.

"What?"

"We're outdoors."

The heliotropic flowers rooted in her sister's skull had noticed this long before, of course, craning so strongly towards the shimmer of sun struggling to burn through the mist and miasma that Ophelia looked more maenad than May queen, half her blossoms gone askew.

"Of course we are," Morticia said, "We're gardening."

The cricket she held chirruped its ghastly, grating song as it tried to leap out of her closed fingers, and Morticia threw open her hand and let it jump directly into Althus' vivid pink gullet, where its song was quickly replaced by the more soothing churn of gastric juices. Morticia held her palm against the waxy surface of the pitcher-blossom to feel the surge and release of its poisons.

"Oh, right," Ophelia said, eyes already hazing as she began to pull at one of the daisies rooted in her crown. "Well, you're gardening. I don't know why you like it so much," she said, "when there are much better things to do that don't involve so much..." Ophelia trailed off.

"So much intelligence?" Morticia suggested, pulling her clippers out from where she had gashed them into the earth. "Skill?"

"Nature," concluded Ophelia finally, scattering the handful of daisy petals she had torn out from her own blossoms while pondering the right word.

Morticia began trimming the edges of the poison bush that was encroaching on the edge of the bench where her sister was sitting. "I suppose it is violent, I'll give you that," Ophelia said, watching as cochineal buds fell beneath her sister's shears, blowing open in distress at their sudden decapitation to release a final, wheezing puff of pollen.

"Not as much as it could be," said Morticia, frowning at the blossom that had just fallen, its petals already withering. Her hair, unbraided, fell forward like a curtain as she leaned in to cut another cluster. "How I do wish Mamma hadn't used that story about that delightful Professor Rappaccini as kindling. He did have such magnificent ideas for a garden." Morticia sighed, stroking her fingers upwards along the long cone of one closed bud, her fingertips blistering. "But then I do suppose it's only fair, seeing that the author's family burned Great Grandma Singe and all back in Salem."

"Two of my suitors are coming tonight," Ophelia said.

"What does that have to do with gardens?" Morticia reopened her shears with a violent jerk of her arms. When their blades, slick with sap and crushed leaves, pulled apart, they made a sound that was not unlike the squelch of living muscle being ripped from bone. Ever since her sister had turned seventeen, she was interested in the most ridiculous pastimes.

"I'm taking them both on."

Morticia stared at her sister, snapping the shears shut and open again in quick succession.

"At judo," Ophelia added.

"Oh." Morticia's voice was barely audible over the snap-squelch of the scissoring blades.

"You're going to come watch, right?"

Morticia reached up to start clipping the buds that clustered right above her sister's head. "No. I have to stay with Cleopatra."

"I don't see what's so important about that plant. It's barely poisonous, and I've never seen it eat more than two rats at once."

"She's spent a long time underground," she said, stroking the nearest tendril. "And I'd like to see you be as poisonous after you've been buried for twenty years."

Ophelia shrugged. "Stay out here with her, then. I think I hear their car, anyway."

Morticia casually dropped her shears again as she watched her sister weave unsteadily towards the house, and breathed in the necrotic burn of the pruned lotus' pollen, practicing folding her arms in front of her, one nestled into the other. She had been used to folding her arms across her chest like a corpse, but her body wouldn't let her do that comfortably for long anymore, so she was trying to master crossing them across her waist, fingertips to elbow, neat as a bat.

As the last haze of sunlight finally asphyxiated beneath the rising gloom of twilight and toxin, Morticia smiled as she felt one of Cleopatra's tendrils wind its way tentatively up her left leg, knifing deliciously into her skin as it twined up her black-stockinged legs, leaving behind a pattern of snags and ladders through which patches of her ashen shone like nacre.

***

On Morticia's fourteenth birthday, her mother gave her the suicides' graveyard for her garden. "Since you insist on going outside so much," she had said, "at least you can do it somewhere gloomy."

Morticia wondered if Mamma was worried she would turn into Mrs. Barker, but she much preferred the peppery tangle of her mother's herbs, growing downward from where they had rooted in the rotten wood above her cauldron, to the ghastly sight of Mrs. Barker's poor petunias, trapped in their perfect squares of earth, no weeds to choke them.

On the other hand, the suicides' graveyard was the largest one they had, rivaled only by the memorial garden of those members of her family who had been struck by lightning, an undertaking for which the Frumps showed great talent. Some few fascinating plants already grew there; Morticia had once come out to find one of the Bladdergout shrubs dragging itself across the ground with a mechanical motion not unreminiscent of a galvanized corpse. Outside of that, though, the ground mostly gave off sparks and caused her hair to stand on end at inopportune moments, and she dove into the flora of the suicides' graveyard with great delight.

Cleopatra, though, had been her prize find. She had been digging out Cousin Augusta's grave, and among the treasures impacted in the earth she had found one of Augusta's two skulls, several of her tail bones, a ring with two vultures stretching their wings across an ichor-dark stone, and, suddenly, a magnificent vine that seemed never to end. She had spent all night digging around the vine and even stayed out until daylight, wrapping her shawl over her head to keep the sunlight off her braids and brow. The vine grew wider the deeper she dug, and its roots and branches shot out all around her; by dreadful noon she felt like she was standing in an underground thicket woven of cemetery earth and celadon branches, a witch-wood, buried alive.

The vine had sprouted from an urn Augusta must have clutched when she was buried; if it had been meant to die with her, it sprouted instead. Its roots had shattered the urn to shards long ago, and then exploded through her ribcage. Morticia could see bits of both tangled in the curling vines, but could not tell at a glance what was porcelian and what was bone.

Clawing at the dirt and splintered coffin wood around the base of the vine, Morticia felt herself an archeologist like Uncle Crimp, who they believed was sealed alive while taking a nap in an Egyptian tomb, and suddenly thought of the monument they had seen in the city, torn out of sands, shipped across seas and rails. She and Mamma had gone to see it once when the weather was gloomy enough to warrant being outside so long. Mamma had read the hieroglyphics aloud, correcting the jumbled translation given on the plaque beneath it. "Now that's not right at all," she said, "Someone should be hanged by the entrails for that."

A small child skittered back towards its own mother, who had already turned to avoid walking directly past the black-veiled woman and her equally obscured daughter.

"What's not right, Mamma?"

"They think this belonged to Cleopatra."

"That delightful woman with the asps?"

"She wouldn't have anything this gauche!"

Still, digging up the vine, Morticia had thought of the stone obelisk, alive with meaning, its words made from sharp-beaked birds and sly profiles, lying interred beneath the desert as though at the bottom of an impossible ocean, holding its secret until someone, the right someone, came along with a shovel.

When she had dug far enough, she discovered that the vine's head was curled all the way around to its root. The vine stirred with a sluggish motion and nuzzled Morticia's ash-stained cheek.

"Oh," she had said, "Oh, you poor dear. You must be hungry. Nothing to eat but earthworms and gophers."

The plant began to wind tendrils around her arms.

"My Cleopatra," she said. "Let's get you out of the sun."

***

Left alone, finally, in the gathering dark, Morticia clipped half a dozen roses from the bushes that clustered against the northwest corner of the cemetery wall, their roots in the graves of those Frumps who had garroted themselves. In this thicket her favorite thorns grew, each one bearing a curving barb, thin to the point of translucence, at its tip. Despite the bloodlessness of the corpses on which the bushes fed, each barb glowed with a tinge of blood drawn fresh from the body.

As she chose the stems she could hear voices from across the lawn. The Addams brothers were back. It was a shame the one was so much more handsome than the other, she thought, but then again the other one is clever enough. She hadn't seen him in at least a year.

Morticia climbed on to the pedestal base of Grandfather Scurvy's towering memorial, and piled the roses beside her. Cleopatra curled several vines up her left leg and wrapped her main trunk once around her waist, the way one of Ophelia's suitors might grip her, dancing. Morticia trailed her fingers along the thick vine, crooning softly to her.

"Now, this is better, isn't it? No one to bother us, the moon rising, the poison-" she paused to take a deep breath, "getting stronger, I think." She nodded to herself, smiling. "Yes, definitely stronger. Perhaps we shall beat that Professor Rappaccini at his game, after all."

She picked up the first of her roses and considered her cut. The unhinged jaws of the clippers hesitated over the very top of the stem as she thought about how best to detach the showy bloom from the beauty of the thorns.

"Magnificent!"

The shout was so close, so sudden above her that Morticia would have jumped up completely if Cleopatra didn't have such a firm grip on her waist. As it was, she barely registered her body moving in its natural course, arching backwards, arm curled, then extended in its practiced motion.

She blinked at her sister's younger suitor, sprawled on the ground beneath her feet. He had fallen from high enough to leave a deep impression in the moist ground.

"I didn't mean to startle you."

"That's all right, Mr. Addams," Morticia said, softly, "I didn't mean to stab you."

"Stab?" He started patting up and down his chest, grinning the whole time.

Morticia lowered her arms, straightened up from the backwards lean of her throw, and nodded towards his left leg, where one blade of her clippers lay buried to the hilt.

"Ahaha!" he exclaimed. "Marvelous! I love a girl who knows her way around a knife fight."

She raised her eyebrows.

"Well, knife, clippers..." he said, pulling the blade free with gusto, and handing the clippers back to her, bloody end first. "Missed the artery, though. Better luck next time."

"Shouldn't you be in wrestling with Ophelia, Mr. Addams?" she asked, watching him produce a surprisingly lacy bit of black cloth from his pocket and wrap it around his wounded thigh.

"Ah, she's already pinned me three times. I think it's Fester she's after, anyway, and who can blame her?" He tested his weight on his left leg once or twice. "I came out here to rig up some explosives. Thought I could maybe blow up your grandfather's monument." He jerked his chin upwards.

"How interesting."

"I was up there, hanging upside-down to pack some dynamite under his left arm - and what do I see but a beautiful woman cutting thorns."

He puffed at his cigar. "I didn't recognize you from above without your braids."

Morticia folded her arms across her waist.

"You've grown," he added.

Her lack of response didn't deter him at all. She watched him limp a wavering course around her various plants, stopping to examine several.

"What is this one?"

"Atropa belladonna."

"Is that Italian?" he asked, looking askance at her.

"Latin."

His eyes flashed. "We have a greenhouse, you know, but we hardly ever use the place anymore," he said, tipping his cigar upward with his lower lip, "Seems a shame, really. Ever since Aunt Sepulchra disappeared into the West Indian Tiger-toothed Lilies. Lovely woman, Aunt Sepulchra. No one could wrestle an alligator quite like she did. Shame about the mustache, though. Never could get it quite as long as she wanted," Gomez added, limping closer to where she sat.

Morticia smiled then, lip curling up more on her left side, aware of the distance that had closed between them. She listened to his voice as much as she listened to his words, that rhythm like a train building speed, punctuated by his exclamations the way a train's climb would be by the sharp burst of a whistle.

"You know, you should come see it," he said.

"What?"

"Our greenhouse."

"But Ophelia doesn't like gardening."

"No, I mean just you! I bet you'd just love it! We have some amazing nettles in one corner. Fester and I used to take turns jumping into them when we were kids."

Morticia ran her hands down her long hair, barely touching it, as if smoothing out a cobweb veil, too delicate to touch.

Gomez leaned on the pedestal, delicately touching the very tip of one thorn; in the crepuscular moonlight, his bare arm, streaked with his own drying blood, looked different to her, new. Morticia found herself wondering what his arm would taste like, and it wasn't her usual thinking about how people would taste if Mamma was allowed to cook them, but a more subtle sort of taste, as though she wanted to see if his skin would taste more like blood or like gunpowder, and if it would feel rough or smooth against her tongue.

She had opened her mouth slightly, struggling to come up with a .... Cleopatra lunged out between them, mouth suddenly open, suddenly clamped on Gomez's bared forearm.

"Look at that! She likes me!" he marvelled, jumping back, still holding his lit cigar despite the fact that Cleopatra had clamped firmly onto his arm. "Ha!!"

"Cleopatra," Morticia scolded, reaching out to pet the long leaves that were darkening with blood. "That's not how we treat our guests. Mamma says we must always ask first if someone wants to be bitten."

Gomez's eyes were shining, wider than before. "Those aren't the rules Ophelia follows."

Morticia slid off of the pedestal base, smoothing her hair down again.

"Cleopatra! Stop that"

The plant grew slack but did not let go.

"I'm afraid I might need to be a little more firm. If you don't mind..." She trailed off, one hand poised in the air in front of her, aware of dreadful color rushing to her face even as it drained from Gomez's.

"Be my guest," he said, holding his good arm open to allow her closer access. Up close, he smelled of tobacco and explosives and somehow, too, of all the toxins of her garden. "I do hope she's poisonous."

"I don't know. She's never done this before."

She ran her fingers along Cleopatra's spiky leaves, dotting them with her own blood as she pulled, until the plant ripped free, vines whipping backwards away from where they stood. Morticia and Gomez bent their heads together over Gomez's arm, the ends of Morticia's hair trailing in the gore of the wound.

"Do let me know if your arm turns black," she said.

He raised his eyebrows, smiling.

"Or falls off," she added.

"Do you think there's a chance of that?" he asked, voice louder, white teeth clamped over cigar again.

"Well, I suppose there's always a chance."

"Capital! Well, the explosives will have to wait. I've got to show this to Fester!"

He turned to go, but doubled back quickly, grabbed her arm and turned it upwards, and roughly kissed the inside of her wrist, and at her waist she felt the sudden prick of one of Cleopatra's sharp-edged leaves.

As she watched him limp and run back towards the house, she kept trying to brush the leaf away, only her fingers could not reach it.

Beneath her bat-folded arms, beneath her soil-stained dress, beneath her nacre skin, a sharp, small pain stabbed, bright and welcome as a needle.

*****

(Dear Reader: Now that you have read my small offering, I do hope that you have not objected to the intertwining, growth, and regrowth of the canon-garden on our way into the graveyard-garden of Morticia's youth.)

 


End file.
